Learn all about Google’s ‘Link spam update’ in 2021

Learn all about Google’s ‘Link spam update’ in 2021

Hello webmasters, Google is back with a new update called the Link spam update. Here is all you need to know about this update and some specific guidelines to manage spam links.

What is Google’s latest algorithm update?

Google has launched this new algorithm update to broadly improve the quality of the search results. This latest update, which is rolling out over the next few weeks, is focused on identifying and nullifying manipulative links on websites that allow sponsored, affiliate and guest posts.

Link building is a fundamental process in SEO and website owners commonly use outbound links within the content to get better visibility in Google search engine result pages (SERPs). However, sometimes website owners practice some of the wrong SEO techniques, like the use of spammy backlinks, to boost their website’s organic traffic.

What is Google’s Link spam update about?

Google Link spam update works at nullifying these unreliable spammy links that helped in high rankings of your page. This does not necessarily mean that Google will penalize the websites, instead, it will ignore and not evaluate these links anymore, which is obviously like a penalty to the website.

Link spam update will nulify spammy backlinks

How can Link spam Update impact rankings?

If your website does not comply with Google’s guidelines for link schemes, then you might see a sharp drop in your website’s rankings.

Some of the inappropriate link schemes that violate Google’s guidelines include:

  • Buying backlinks
  • Generate backlinks using bots or auto-services
  • Targeted guest blogging

How to deal with Google Link spam update?

In particular, Google is picking out affiliate links and links from sponsored guest content. Hence, below are a set of best practices to prevent getting hit by the latest update.

  1. Websites participating in affiliate programs should appropriately qualify these affiliate links by using the attribute rel=”sponsored” to the hyperlink tag.
  1. Websites must add tag rel=”ugc” to the links if there is a value exchange between the two domains, like the links from sponsored posts such as advertisements and paid links.
  1. Despite the links created manually or dynamically, Google recommends that links from guest posts are to be marked up with the rel=”nofollow” value.

Thus, if you are using WordPress, then you can use ‘functions.php’ to add these attributes or if you are using manual links, then you can edit the links one after the other.

WRAPPING UP

  • Link spam is a global update across multiple languages which impacts both inbound and outbound links that are not natural and manipulative.
  • Websites taking part in link spam will see a drop in their rankings as these links are re-assessed by the new Link spam algorithm update.
  • Google advises website owners to focus on improving the site content and user experience, which help in attracting new backlinks naturally over time that are in accordance with Google’s webmaster guidelines.
  • The Link spam update will encourage the appropriate process of link-building and ensure that website owners don’t trade the links.
  • Make sure you are in compliance with the new Link spam update by following the best practices and invest in appropriately tagged links.
Durga

Durga

About The Author…

Durga has a master’s degree in engineering. Technological advances in digital space interest her a lot. Digital marketing is her forte and she passionately follows latest trends in the digital marketing space. She has written many trending articles on various social media platforms. Her areas of interest include SEO Optimization, structured data, SMM, Keywords research and analysis etc. She is focused, resourceful and dedicated.

Did you know sometimes deindexing your webpage can increase your website traffic?

Did you know sometimes deindexing your webpage can increase your website traffic?

The websites are designed to be the virtual brand ambassadors of any organization. The content on the website is designed to attract more audiences to its webpage. There are multitudes of ways in which one can attract the right audience to a particular website. The content on the webpages plays a vital role in driving organic traffic to a website. Here we are discussing how deindexing can improve the performance of your website and drive better traffic to your website. Let us enlighten ourselves with these technical jargons first.

What is crawling and indexing?

Website crawling is a process in which software is deployed to search documents on the web with the intent to build an index for a webpage. This software program creates a copy of the visited webpages, which will be available for processing by a search engine. The crawlers help in maintenance tasks on a website, like checking links and HTML codes. Crawlers do an in-depth scan of webpages by following links from one webpage to another.

Crawling a website is an activity mainly dedicated to indexing the content on the web, meaning the web pages are indexed based on meta-data, keywords, etc. A webpage with ease of navigability and clear and targeted content will rank higher on the search results.

When should you deindex your webpage?

Deindexing is useful when you do not want outdated and duplicate content to be indexed. For example, multiple versions of your webpage, like the printer-friendly one or the regular one, may get indexed under different URLs. De-indexing irrelevant and duplicate content may help build better traffic to your webpage.

duplicate content with different uRLs

There are many aspects that can assist in indexing the relevant pages from your website. Setting up robot.txt file sitemaps are useful ways in which the crawlers can be guided to the right source that needs indexation and leave out irrelevant ones.
The robot.txt file controls the crawler traffic on your website and specifically defines which parts of the website to crawl and which to crawl not. The Sitemap similarly provides the blueprint of your website and allows the web crawler to index the most important pages on your site by listing the same.

How does this deindexing help in boosting the website traffic?

De-indexing takes away irrelevant outdated content from being indexed, hence allowing the organic traffic to reach the appropriate and relevant webpage on your website. Excessive indexing of web pages by search engines may lead to a situation called Index bloat, where an excess of low-value pages have automatically got indexed. The index bloat will slow down web crawling of important content which may be of high value from an SEO standpoint. It can pull down your ranking, in turn affecting your Domain authority. Hence, it’s prudent to de-index content that is irrelevant and of low value in attracting a targeted audience to your website.

How can you Deindex a webpage?

The easiest way will be to remove redundant content from the web pages. Other tools like Remove URL Tool, Remove Content Tool, Meta Robots Noindex tag, robot.txt, and sitemaps can be very helpful in structuring the content and presenting the web content in a relevant manner to the end-user.

Conclusion

While we are looking to get more visibility for our brands and organizations, making the targeted and relevant pages more visible to the web bots or crawlers will help in channelising quality web traffic to our sites. Stay ahead of time and become more connected with the current trends and avoid irrelevant pages that bring down our valuable branding strategies.

Anitha Ramachandruni

Anitha Ramachandruni

About The Author…

Anitha Ramachandruni, is an MBA graduate having rich experience in the field of Digital Marketing.
She is passionate about writing and has been exploring the content writing field with her specific insights on Digital Marketing. She has hands-on experience working with many clients and adding more value to their brands. She is also an avid reader and likes to keep herself updated with the latest technologies in the world.

The Ultimate Guide to Google’s  ‘About this Result’ Feature

The Ultimate Guide to Google’s ‘About this Result’ Feature

Given that Google has become the ‘Go To’ solution finder for all the curious minds out there, we must admit each one of us does spend a significant amount of time on the Google Search engine to enlighten ourselves with more knowledge every single day. Over a period, the search relevancy and authenticity of the results and links have taken the hot seat and made the analysts question the relevancy of our keywords and the authenticity of the results. The outcome is the new addition of a feature called ‘About this result’ by Google on their search engine results page. Let us discover more about this feature today.

401K tips

Courtesy: Search Engine Land

 

What is ‘ About this Result’ Feature

The ‘About this result’ feature was rolled out earlier this year (2021) in a beta phase and has received a recent update to itself. Currently, the feature provides a sturdy and comprehensive information panel, rolling information on the web page source, allowing the user to choose a more accurate and reliable information link.

Google has always made the end-user experience of paramount importance and worked towards enriching the user experience in myriad ways. Google narrows down information sought by the user by narrowing down relevant and useful content, employing many factors in its search algorithm. The algorithm links the keywords in the search query and the webpage ranking, which is based on how often a particular keyword is used on that page. The keyword density provides a higher ranking to a particular page and provides a higher-up position to that web page on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

How is it Going to Help the End User?

The ‘ About this Result’ Feature has imbibed in it the machine learning and complex search algorithms to deliver information that enhances User experience. The information box provides details to the level where the user will know more about the website hosting the information and also whether it uses HTTPS protocols to provide secure connections.

The Users can see suggestions for matching keywords or relevant terms, which may have more specific information they are looking for. There are also tips like the usage of quotation marks around phrases to get targeted results. The search results are more focused on having local relevance. The user will also know whether they are being an audience to paid Ads or they are arriving on results-based organic search results.

Is it available on all devices?

The feature is currently available on all desktops, mobile devices and the Android version of the Google app. The next time you type in a search query, don’t forget to look for the three vertical dots next to the search result displaying the source information and suggestions for you.

Take away

With the amount of information diversifying and multiplying on the Web, we must have a robust system assuring the end-users have a more relevant, useful and safe experience online. The feature allows the end-user to give feedback on the results appearing, making it a constantly improving feature to provide the best knowledge gaining and hassle-free experience for every individual user.

Anitha Ramachandruni

Anitha Ramachandruni

About The Author…

Anitha Ramachandruni, is an MBA graduate having rich experience in the field of Digital Marketing.
She is passionate about writing and has been exploring the content writing field with her specific insights on Digital Marketing. She has hands-on experience working with many clients and adding more value to their brands. She is also an avid reader and likes to keep herself updated with the latest technologies in the world.

Top 10 things to check out when your website traffic is dropping

Top 10 things to check out when your website traffic is dropping

If you are a blogger or a digital marketer or a website owner, you might have experienced a noticeable drop in your traffic on multiple occasions. Therefore, it is important to investigate the reasons and tackle this problem to get things back on track.

The first step is to take an in-depth look at your website analytics by using Google Analytics or SEMrush or Google Search Console, to get a much better idea about lost traffic sources and whether your website was hit by any google penalty or is it due to bad SEO?

After analyzing your web analytics, ask yourself a few questions: Is there a sharp decline or a slow and steady decline or a sudden drop-off in your website traffic rankings? Did my site’s traffic drop for a few days or is the traffic recovering on its own? This will set you in the right direction in discovering the possible reason behind the traffic drop.

Let’s take a look at the ten things you should check for when you notice a significant drop in your organic traffic. Go through!

  1. Hit by Google algorithm updates

Google constantly rolls out updates every once in a while. Unfortunately, these changes may have impacted your website. However, keep in mind that this traffic decline can be temporary lasting for at least a week or two. Make use of algorithm-tracking tools like Mozcast or SEMrush or Algoroo to get information on up-to-date algorithm releases and analyze the factors triggering the decline.

  1. Crawl errors

Crawl errors prevent search engine bots from accessing your pages. These errors are caused due to server, redirect and 404 errors, which negatively impact the crawling, indexing, and ranking of your website.

Crawl errors prevent search engine bots from accessing your pages

  1. Manual penalties

If your website ranks high on other search engines and a significant drop in rankings on Google could indicate that you are suffering from the Google penalty because the content on your site is against Google’s guidelines. To fix the problem, check for penalty warning messages in Google search console and take necessary action.

  1. De-indexing of URLs

When Important URLs are removed from the indexing causes a sudden website traffic loss. Check whether the important pages are still in the index using the URL inspection tool, or else use the request indexing option in the Google search console.

  1. SERP layout changes

SERP layout changes impact the way Google displays organic results like showing knowledge graphs, featured snippets, suggestions and advertisements, etc. Thus, it can decline your traffic levels. So, make sure you are adaptable to changes.

  1. Page speed

Page load speed not only affects your rankings but also visitors’ user experience. When page speed is slow, the bounce rates are higher. Check your page speed using the PageSpeed tool.

  1. Server issues

If the website encounters server issues because of a broken caching function, then look for errors in your server logs and resolve them quickly.

  1. Redesign of website

Substantial website changes, like redesign or content migration, may have potentially reduced traffic and rankings. Pay close attention to the concerning aspects like 301 redirects, site audit, etc. to avoid negative impact.

  1. SEO technical issues

Technical SEO issues are the baseline of your website that can stop you from ranking. It affects how the search engines crawl and index your page. Make sure you fix the issues to keep your rankings up.

  1. Cannibalisation

When a website appears for a keyword with multiple URLs due to keyword cannibalisation, it results in link losses, which may hurt your visibility and traffic. Make sure you track the lost inbound links to get them back.

FINAL THOUGHT

Organic traffic decline can be greatly damaging to your website rankings if unaddressed. However, carefully analyze with the right tools and follow a proper approach to uncover the reasons behind the issue. Take time to fix things with a strategic plan and restore your website rankings and organic traffic.

Durga

Durga

About The Author…

Durga has a master’s degree in engineering. Technological advances in digital space interest her a lot. Digital marketing is her forte and she passionately follows latest trends in the digital marketing space. She has written many trending articles on various social media platforms. Her areas of interest include SEO Optimization, structured data, SMM, Keywords research and analysis etc. She is focused, resourceful and dedicated.

How to protect your website from the negative impacts of duplicate content ?

How to protect your website from the negative impacts of duplicate content ?

The appearance of similar content on other websites or in multiple places on a site or social media platforms is not an uncommon issue. This duplicate content may be due to intentionally copying texts from your site or can be accidental, however, it must be addressed properly. In this blog, we will evaluate the possible effects of duplicate content on a website, the best ways to identify and fix duplicate content.

What is duplicate content?

In the field of SEO, duplicate content is defined as the content that is the same across multiple web pages of your site or on different web addresses anywhere on the internet. It is categorized into two types:

1. Internal duplicate content – when copies of content are found on multiple web pages on the same website.

2. External duplicate content – when the same content is duplicated in two or more domains. It is also called cross-domain duplicates.

Causes of duplicate content

Let’s take a look at some of the most common causes for duplicate content.

  • Website addresses can appear in different variations, like HTTP or HTTPS, WWW or non-WWW and pages with or without trailing slashes. Incorrect configuration of the server will make your website accessible at two or more of these URL variations.
  • When different websites sell similar products, sometimes they all use the same descriptions in multiple locations across the web.
  • Sometimes, other websites use your content on their websites with or without your consent and might not always link to your original article.
  • E-commerce websites use faceted navigation to filter and sort items on the page. Improper implementation of faceted navigation results in duplicates.

Impact of duplicate content on SEO rankings

  • The internal duplicate content exerts the greatest influence on your SEO than the external one. It will impact the website’s quality, score and credibility, thus leading to lower crawl frequency and rankings.
  • When identical content appears on multiple websites, the Google algorithm will show the site with the highest authority, even if it is not the original source.
  • Having some similar content is sometimes unavoidable, but when a large amount of content is intentionally copied from other sites to manipulate rankings, then it can invariably harm your site rankings and Google will penalise or deindex your website.

How to check and deal with duplicate content?

To check for duplicate content within the website and across the web.

  • Go to Ahrefs site audit and start a crawl. Now, head to the content quality report and look for clusters highlighted in orange without a canonical. These are duplicates and near-duplicates.
  • Look for warnings in the Google search console and HTML tags report.
  • Use any of Google’s duplicate content checker tools, like Copyscape, Plagspotter, to check occurrences of the content on your page on the web.
  • Find duplicate content by searching Google for a snippet of text from your page in quotation marks.

If the content has been scraped, then the related URLs will show up on the SERPs.
Below are some of the best practices for dealing with duplicate content.

Best practices for dealing with duplicate content

  • Canonical tags

Adding rel=canonical attribute to a page makes it clear to Google which version of a page is preferred for indexing. The canonical tag can be used for print, mobile, desktop and web versions of content.

  • Redirects

A typical solution for eliminating duplicate content is to implement a 301 redirect to the higher-performing pages in search results.

  • Meta tagging

Using the ‘no-index’ meta robots tag to the HTML code of the page will effectively make Google not index a page and preferably, not to show in search results.

  • Parameter Handling

Employ parameter handling through Google search console and Webmaster tools to signal search engines that these pages should not be crawled.

Conclusion

Understand that possessing large amounts of duplicated content on a website will harm your SEO rankings and organic traffic. Although penalties are rare, search engines treat these pages as less authoritative. Google wants to rank and index web pages with distinct information. Hence, detect and fix duplicate content issues for better rankings and quality scores in SERPs. However, it might take time, but make sure you take action.

Durga

Durga

About The Author…

Durga has a master’s degree in engineering. Technological advances in digital space interest her a lot. Digital marketing is her forte and she passionately follows latest trends in the digital marketing space. She has written many trending articles on various social media platforms. Her areas of interest include SEO Optimization, structured data, SMM, Keywords research and analysis etc. She is focused, resourceful and dedicated.

7 important things to remember while migrating  Ecommerce data collection from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4

7 important things to remember while migrating Ecommerce data collection from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4

Data is one of the assets of great worth for any business, irrespective of size or industry. Google Analytics is a simple and reliable tool to track a website’s crucial data. This data is utilized to analyze and develop marketing decisions to build a successful SEO strategy for digital marketing. Read on to find out more about Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a web analytics tool launched by Google in 2005 that tracks and reports website traffic or user behaviour. It has undergone many versions, and Universal Analytics(UA) is one of them that was introduced in 2012.

In the E-commerce industry, data collection efficiency plays a vital role in shaping customer strategies and thus analytics is a must. Google Analytics E-commerce report can track a website’s transactions, revenue, sales activity, and many other related aspects. This information helps to develop new strategies to expand the customer base, maximizing customer value and for increasing conversions, etc.

Google analytics 4 offers new ways to control data privacy

The updated version of Universal Analytics which was released in 2020, is Google Analytics 4(formerly called Google App+Web). It offers new ways to control data and privacy. Therefore, if you are planning to upgrade from Universal Analytics property to Google Analytics 4 property then below we have listed a few important things to remember for a successful transition of E-commerce data collection. Take a look!

  1. Do not alter your Universal Analytics implementation.
  1. Develop duplicate events for your Google Analytics 4 property. Unlike Universal Analytics, GA4 measures events and parameters on the user property level.
  1. Although it is possible to use your existing Universal Analytics E-commerce event names and parameters for your Google Analytics 4 property, it is not recommended. gtag.js implementations provide the option to reuse existing Universal Analytics E-commerce events for GA 4 by using connected site tags.
  1. Add additional events to capture data in the new schema because it is advisable to have two implementations in place: one for your Google Analytics 4 property and one for Universal Analytics.
  1. Google Tag Manager has a new tag for GA4 property to add a separate tracking code to your website.
  1. While upgrading to GA4 property custom events are not automatically migrated. You have to include the required parameters for E-commerce-specific events.
  1. Map the E-commerce events and parameters between Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4 properties. In Google Analytics 4 properties, there is no difference between E-commerce and enhanced E-commerce.

CONCLUSION

  • Google Analytics 4 properties offer companies better control over tracking important metrics like organic traffic, returning visitors, conversions, and more.
  • Google has made it effortless to create a GA4 property based on an existing Universal Analytics property using the GA4 setup assistant.
  • Google Analytics 4 allows businesses to harness all the benefits of GA4 while retaining the ability to switch between properties at any time.
Durga

Durga

About The Author…

Durga has a master’s degree in engineering. Technological advances in digital space interest her a lot. Digital marketing is her forte and she passionately follows latest trends in the digital marketing space. She has written many trending articles on various social media platforms. Her areas of interest include SEO Optimization, structured data, SMM, Keywords research and analysis etc. She is focused, resourceful and dedicated.

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